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Entropic Reliquary

Part 1 Project 2015Gregory BarrettUniversity of the West of England Bristol UKThe Entropic Reliquary attempts to harness the force of ‘oblivion’, the power of the forgotten, in physical form. Drawn from a vision for the locale, this purpose permeates the wider landscape and coalesces into an ordered sequence of moments in built form: architecture here utilising the phenomena of oblivion in distilling experience, imagination, pretence and context… Creating powerful memories through forgetting.The design draws upon the encroaching force of natural entropic decay subsuming the post industrial, cultural, and physical context of this palimpsest landscape. In the same way memories are created from the raw force of forgetting, the core process of the intervention is the distillation of gin, a result of the character of the harvested, ever growing and eroding, natural botanicals of Sharpness. As a reliquary, the design hoards and treasures the seeds reclaimed from this process, replanting them in the wider web of artefacts that forms the setting to spur on these natural processes.The intervention seeks to embrace oblivion in totality. Much like a memory, if the architecture is not maintained, revisited and reimagined, the building will strategically succumb to decay. The design: a true engine of entropy, reseeding the landscape from which it draws its purpose.